Re: ref counting in Bonobo

[lacage email enst fr (Mathieu Lacage)]

Svanberg Liss <lisss@ydab.se> writes:

> <quote>
> # Here's an example of an alternative mechanism you could support in this
> # way:  Servers support an interface that's internal to Bonobo that allows
> # clients to register a ping interface with them.  When the client obtains
> # the initial reference it registers a ping interface (this would have to be
> # handled by the mechanism that hands initial references to the client).
> # When the client's reference count reaches zero, it unregisters the ping
> # interface.  On the server side, each time a client registers a ping
> # interface with the server, the server uses the object's Unknown interface
> # to increase the ref count on the object.  It decreases the ref count
> # whenever a client unregisters the ping interface, or whenever the client
> # fails to respond to an actual ping attempt after a certain amount of time.
> # All of this server-side work should be wrapped in library routines as
> # well, so that it is transparent to the server implementation.
> <endquote>
> 
> If I have understood it right, we have a
>  interface Ping {
>  	void Foo ();
>  };
> 
> that all Gnome objects should implement, and that should be used as "ticket"
> when a "client" want's to connect to a "server".
> This way the server would be able to "ping" it's clients now and then, to
> see if they are alive.
> ( Or actually, the framework in bonobo )

If i am not wrong, i think that this feature is also implemented as the 
gnome_object_ping function (once more, not sure about its name but there
was one around some time ago. It should be still there)
Basically, this function did a ref/unref to test whether the Object was 
still there. However, there was a major pb with this: Objects which had
never been referenced before or something in the kind. This was some
VERY difficult pb (at least, it seemed so to me): Eliot talked about
some socket stuff... Perhaps this has been adressed since then.
I refer you to the list archives (my mail folder underwent some big 
surgery recently)

Mathieu